To his Wife before sailing for Europe.

BREVOORT HOUSE, Tuesday night. DEAREST: We are in the midst of a snow-storm, but the Cunard steamers wait for nothing, and besides it will probably be clear to-morrow. I was very deeply drained by the last few days at home, but surprised that I was able to stand so much. There was a cheery crowd of men at the depot; the Briggses and Merricks were on the train; and I had a pleasant call at New Haven with the Whitneys, and got in here in good season at night, and went to bed by eleven o'clock, and had a fair sleep for me. To-day I have been about a little, but not so much as I had proposed. The weather was bad, and I could not go over to Brooklyn without too great fatigue, and so I cut that and some other calls I had intended to make. I find it very easy to say good-bye to friends after the hard strain of parting with home and its nearer and dearer ones. On the whole I feel better and cheerier about my going away than I have done. I have faith that it will all work out rightly and happily for my and our happiness and health. At any rate, we must both act and live as though we expected and believed that. But as I have kept clear of emotional indulgences since I left home, I will not get back to them now, for if I do I shall break down. You know how I feel and what I should say if I yielded to the impulses of the heart and the occasion. . .

BREVOORT, 9 o'clock, Wednesday.

DEAREST: Now good-bye for a few months. We shall come together again, healthier and happier-both better I trust for the separation. Don't shut yourself up. Go out, circulate around, see your friends, and know always that I never shall be so happy as when I know you are well and happy and enjoying all that life gives you of home and friends and beauty and love around you.

has just come in to say good-bye. He will write you. He accepts our offer. I am very glad of it. Now send him and the money regularly, and tell nobody.

Kisses and love for children, and love for every friend.

UNTIL

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE CIVIL WAR.

NTIL April, 1861, politics was but an incidental and minor interest of the American citizen. The people of the Northern states plowed and reaped, builded and traded, and were absorbed in the interests of the family and the neighborhood. They read the newspapers, talked over the news of the day, went to townmeeting or to the polling-place once or twice a year, and seemed to leave the affairs of the nation mainly to congressmen, editors, and wire-pullers. Then the aspect of the country changed as suddenly as when the curtain rises on a new scene in the theater. These men of peace left their plows and shops and forges, and by hundreds of thousands enlisted for the discipline of the camp and the perils of the battle-field. The flower of the population resolved itself into an army. Back of that army lay the resources and the hearts of the entire community.

The people of the South fought to vindicate their political independence and in defense of their homes. To the typical Southerner, always attached to his state and his section more than to the Union, the defense of the Confederacy against invasion was as natural an impulse as was his forefathers' maintenance of American independence against Great Britain. A minority had opposed secession as politically inexpedient. But the moment

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the invasion of Northern armies was seen to impend, the instinct to defend their firesides roused the whole white population into a resistance as united and as resolute as ever a people made. The slaves remained peacefully at their work, save when the approach of the Union armies tempted the more adventurous to flight. Many of them, when emancipated in the course of the war, enlisted in the Union armies, and showed abundant courage as well as capacity for discipline. The masters of the slaves did not venture to enroll them as troops, but families were freely entrusted to their fidelity on many a lonely plantation.

The people of the North had not their independence to fight for, or their homes to defend. Secession, if successful, would have left to the Northern communities the same independence as to the Southern. There was no immediate menace to Northern firesides. But what was menaced was the unity of the American nation. By a marvelous instinct the common people of the Northern states realized that the breaking up of the Union was an ultimate danger to the personal freedom and safety of all its present and future myriads. It was the first step in the dissolution of a great social order into warring atoms. They recognized, by an intuition deeper than logic, that the welfare of each household in the land was bound up with the organic life of the nation. They saw in the stars and stripes the imperiled symbol of the common good and the common right. To defend that they staked their fortunes and their lives.

The North began the war in a temper of passionate ardor and hope, looking for speedy victory. The defeat at Bull Run was a bitter disappointment; but after the first shock came a bracing of the sinews for a longer effort, very long, they thought, it could not be. Then followed the organization and slow training of McClellan's army; the schooling of the nation in patience; a confident expectation that the Peninsular campaign in

early summer of 1862 was to be the decisive stroke;— then the seven days' struggle, and the heart-sickening sense that it had failed. Fresh calls for troops followed; then the rebels' invasion of Maryland and their repulse at Antietam;-the successes in the West, the resistless march down the Mississippi and its tributaries, to meet the conquerors of New Orleans;-but for the brave army of the Potomac fresh repulses, and the slaughters of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg. So went the tremendous alternation, hope now drooping at delay, now flushed by triumph. The story was not single but million-fold, as in the homes of East and West the eyes of fathers and mothers and wives and sisters were fastened on their soldier in the field, while they followed with scarce less eagerness the fortunes of the cause to which they had given so much.

Slowly turned the doubtful tide of war. Lee's army taking the offensive met at Gettysburg a great disaster; thrown again on the defensive, again it held at bay the overwhelming numbers which the North poured against it. Vicksburg fell and Port Hudson;- "the father of waters," said Lincoln, "flows again unvexed to the sea." Grant, the conqueror of the West, was called to lead the final assault on the rebel capital; then came a summer of multitudinous slaughter;- meanwhile, Sherman's victorious march through the heart of the exhausted South, then the winter before Petersburg, besieger and besieged locked in the last grim clutch,— until outnumbered, starved, overborne, but dangerous to the last, Lee's army fell. The agony was ended, the nation was

one, and free.

The North's first impulse of loyalty to the Union became mixed as the struggle went on with both finer and coarser forces. It fought at first for an unbroken nationality. Soon rose in many minds the purpose, not only to preserve but to purify that nationality,—to make

That pur

an end of the legalized wrong against a race. pose was opposed for a while by the legalists, the timid, the selfish but it prevailed; and the North fought through the last half of the war for universal freedom as well as for national unity. At bottom the South was fighting for the power to hold men in slavery, and the North was fighting to break down that power.

Yet other motives had large place. The North had a great material stake in the contest. To the West, the possession of the lower Mississippi by a foreign power meant commercial vassalage. While the South was utterly impoverished by the war,-its one product, cotton, being shut off from market by a blockade which also excluded all imports,- the teeming population and manifold industry of the North were not exhausted by the drafts of the conflict. Its shipping was driven from the seas by the Confederate cruisers, but its commerce went on though under foreign flags. Its farms and factories and shops and colleges were full and flourishing. The equipment and supply of the armies created temporary activities; general business throve; the expansion of the currency gave a feverish activity to trade. Great fortunes were made out of army contracts, honestly and dishonestly; and the poor cloth sometimes furnished for uniforms gave a new name, "shoddy," for sudden and ill-gotten wealth. The volunteers of the early years were largely from the best class of citizens; but as the supply of such recruits slackened, recourse was had to large bounties; forced drafts were made; and the men thus enrolled, and those who enlisted for the high pay, were of an inferior class. Politics became more passionate than rational, and a class of politicians flourished who traded on passions which they did not share.

But in its broad aspect it was an ennobling period. Men learned to live for something larger than self. The